apt repository hosted on S3
I just got finished writing a new s3 connection method for apt-get which will allow us to host our apt repository on amazon. apt is a frontend to the debian package management system used by both debian and ubuntu linux for packing software for installation/update/removal.
We use debs to package up, version and distribute our software across our infrastructure. This makes it easy for us to roll out things in production quickly and reliably.
The mod I had to make was adding an additional c/c++ executable into the /usr/lib/apt/methods/ folder called “s3”. It simply attaches an AWS HTTP header to every outgoing request. The only annoying part was figuring out how to generate the AWS signature in C for which there was no example code to go on.
Anyway, it works. Now we simply add “s3://s3.amazonaws.com/aptrepo” (the key being the s3 protocol part of that url) into our /etc/apt/sources.list on all the ubuntu machines and we’re good to go.